Poem Begun on Good FridaY

Tim DeJong

Today’s homily was about wreckage,
how we float amongst it on the surface 
of our lives flailing after solace.
In this metaphor the ships all need repairing.
And after all what doesn’t come undone?
Even in spring, the once-dormant grass greening,
the wind pries at the house’s loose corners, soughs
and eddies at the back door that will not stay closed.
Wasps have nested in the porch ceiling fan,
and boards splay from the decayed back fence
like divers readying for water.

All the same, I am in a mild season. 
I planted two trees and they blossomed.
I injured my back and it healed.
Ease, like grief, can arrive and tarry,
can lift the body, gentle, into what it will carry.
Five years ago today my father died,
or rather what remained of him did,
the ruined shell of him following him on,
coda to the swift departure and pained decade after
what made him Jack—his mind—
had gone. Cheap funereal phrase,
failure of words: “his health declined.”
No carving out in language the belching, 
the shouting, the hollowed-out stare, and more,
or the feelings they engendered in us,
the visceral sickness of that despair, or the night
of the soul I got out of bed having listened
for some time to my mother
weeping on the bathroom floor.

From such extremes we ascend or descend
to the mean. Once my grandfather, on reading 
something I’d written about happiness,
not unkindly disagreed, having seen
enough pain firsthand to think it naïve.
I now suppose whatever you believe 
life to be mostly about, time will conspire
to prove you one day wrong. Maybe we’re owed
this much, given that sometimes to keep
from boredom or rage or to feel less alone
we must poke at the world’s rough skin
to see what it will yield, to demand to know 
what we flail inside, silence or song. As a kid 
I liked both. Walking home, I’d cut across
a field, leap the muddy patches, earphones 
pulsing with sound, parsing a singer’s lyrics
to decode what they might mean.
Maybe something. Maybe not much, 
but I listened, restless, half-doubting, 
the way one chooses, when young, whether to step
on the cracks in the sidewalk or on
the smooth patches between,
the way every choice becomes risk: that of trying,
as one must, to believe in what must be
believed to be seen.

Tim DeJong lives in the Waco, Texas area and is originally from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in several journals, among them Waxwing, Image, Mudlark, Rattle, and descant, and has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes. His website is timothydejong.com.